Elearning Superstars is a curated list of inspiring elearning examples, published every Tuesday. Subscribe to get weekly updates via email. This week we have some great elearning by The Science Museum, Linda Dong, and Training Bricks. Showcase your elearning: Have you created a great piece of elearning that you’re really proud of? Showcase your elearning here to win awards and get published on Elearning Superstars. 1. The Science Museum: Climate Science 2. Introduction to Financial Statements 3. Linda Dong: The Dangers of Fracking The post Elearning inspiration: The Science Museum, Linda Dong, and Training Bricks appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Are you an eLearning manager working with a talented but large or distributed team? Looking for ways to increase the efficiency of your team? Read on to learn why online collaboration might be the answer. Today I’m going to share some solutions to help you solve the common challenges that are affecting your Learning and Development (L&D) team’s efficiency. I’ll address the 3 phases in eLearning development process: design, development, and review. The 3 Phases In eLearning Development Process: Design, Development, and Review. 1. The Design Phase In the old days, key stakeholders would pass eLearning projects on to the design and development teams who would produce the shiny eLearning courses. Problems came up when the key stakeholders saw the finished product some time later and it either didn’t meet the original requirements or the requirements had changed in the time it had taken to get the project out. Oops! All that time was wasted and now you’re stuck with painful change requests. Prototyping. With rapid eLearning tools, you can now build functioning prototypes early in the process, without spending much money. You can get these early designs in front of stakeholders before you start development, and then iterate until you get the solution right. Online collaboration plays an important role during the iterations. Authoring tools -like Elucidat- include a comments feature that lets you provide feedback by adding sticky notes on the screen exactly over elements. This is useful if you want specific feedback on specific elements. For example, is the logo correctly displayed? Or are the colors acceptable? You can share your feedback and comments with people in your organization so they can sign off on the design before you start any costly development. 2. The Development Phase  With most eLearning courses, you’ll be using a multi-talented team of authors, graphic designers, and developers. In order to compress time lines and reduce costs, you don’t want your team sitting idle while waiting for files that someone else is working on. Authoring tools with inbuilt collaboration enable your team to work on projects simultaneously. Instead of packaging up and sending big eLearning files over email or via the network, team members can access and make changes directly inside the tool via an internet connection. Inbuilt collaboration encourages agile development by allowing you to bring your entire team into the development phase. In the past, you may have used waterfall methodologies such as ADDIE. In this scenario, you have a lot of contact with stakeholders in the design stage, but lose contact during the period of the production. The problem with this approach is you miss out on all the opportunities to collaborate and risk the final product not meeting your stakeholders’ expectations. An agile development approach keeps you in contact all the time, enabling you to iterate and demonstrate the results every week. You get to show progress, ask for feedback and decide together what the next priorities need to be. 3. The Review Phase.   If you’ve been around the eLearning block a few times, you’ll be familiar with the review bottleneck. One of the biggest challenges in managing your project is that subject matter experts and reviewers are busy people with full-time jobs. Traditionally, you might create an alpha version to package up for review. Stakeholders then review the eLearning in a Word document with screenshots and feedback referenced as Page 4 or that picture in a separate document. This is a nightmare to manage and organize. Inbuilt collaboration features can remove a lot of these issues. Instead of being tied to your desktop computer, online collaboration enables anyone with access and an internet connection to view and leave comments. Now, instead of waiting around for feedback or suggesting changes in a separate Word document, you can ask for and get feedback directly inside your eLearning course. Tools such as Elucidat allow you to make comments on the screen and track the responses. This eliminates the need to send files back and forth or track review cycles in other software applications. Summary: Give Online Collaboration A Try Online collaboration can increase the efficiency of your large or distributed Learning and Development team because it makes it easier to work with team members in all the key stages of the development process. Personally, I think the biggest efficiency gain comes in the form of the online review. I love how Elucidat empowers me to collaborate with reviewers directly inside a fully-functioning module (all directly through the system). This facilitates a collaborative process that enhances quality and streamlines efficiency. A version of this article first appeared on ElearningIndustry.com The post Why Online Collaboration Is The Solution To Your Learning And Development Team’s Efficiency Problem appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

If you’re a Learning and Development manager, how can you get your team working together effectively so that all your eLearning projects result in ta-da! moments of triumph? Effective teams know how to collaborate. In this article, we’ll look at a simple exercise called Marshmallow Challenge that can help your team work together and embrace collaboration. The Marshmallow Challenge  Last week, a few colleagues and I got together in a room and were tasked with The Marshmallow Challenge. I thought I’d gone to a session on agile development! The challenge, if you don’t know it, is a fun and instructive design exercise that encourages teams to experience simple but profound lessons in collaboration, innovation and creativity. The challenge seems simple enough: small teams have to build a structure in 18 minutes using 20 sticks of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, 1 yard of string and 1 marshmallow. The winning team is the one that can construct the tallest freestanding structure with the marshmallow on top within the time allowed. The point of the exercise is to collaborate very quickly in order to respond to the task. It reveals some surprising lessons about the nature of collaboration. We spent a little time getting our heads around the task, jockeying for power, then laying out the materials and talking through the approach (the planning stage). Then we spent most of the remaining time taping spaghetti together and wrapping string around arbitrary bits of the structure (the build stage). Then, with seconds to spare, someone grabbed the marshmallow and popped it on top of our structure. Needless to say, it fell over! The challenge has been done hundreds of times and the results are intriguing. Who performs poorly? Recent business school graduates. Why? They cheat and get distracted. They try to find the single correct plan and then attempt to execute that. They run out of time and when they put the marshmallow on top, it’s a crisis. Sound familiar? Who performs well? Kindergarten kids. Why? First of all, none of the kids spend time trying to become CEO of Spaghetti Inc.! More importantly, they start with the marshmallow and then build successive prototypes, all the time keeping the marshmallow on top until they find a solution that works. Kindergarten kids prototype and refine. They adopt an iterative, collaborative process and get instant feedback on what does and doesn’t work. The lesson learned from all this fun? The capacity to experiment and prototype is essential to success. What Can We Learn From This? We all want to avoid the uh-oh moment when the marshmallow causes the structure to collapse. The Marshmallow Challenge teaches us that prototyping and iterating can help achieve success. It also shows that success is dependent upon close collaboration between team members. Here are some simple tips to help keep your marshmallow on top of your eLearning projects: 1. Prototype Use tools that let you build a quick and dirty prototype while involving every member of your team. Cloud-based tools like Elucidat empower your team to work together simultaneously. You can quickly try out ideas, make modifications, and refine your end product. It’s easy to get started with Elucidat. It comes with pre-built screens that your team can experiment with so you don’t have any costly coding up front. 2. Iterate Build courses from a single Course Master (template) so that your team doesn’t waste time on recreating screens again and again. This saves a bunch of time because if something isn’t quite right, you can trash it and quickly start again. 3. Collaborate Online tools make it easy for your team to work together at the same time on the same course. There’s no need to package up the files and send them around to the team via email or via the network. Instead, files are kept in one place and are constantly and automatically updated with everyone’s work. This really saves time and headaches with version control when you have several team members all working on a course at the same time. Related: Why Online Collaboration Is The Solution To Your Learning And Development Team’s Efficiency Problem 4. Feedback Encourage your team and your Subject Matter Experts to work on the project at the same time. Make use of comment and review systems so you can get feedback from the Subject Matter Expert. By encouraging this direct feedback, you can handle changes within the project itself, so you don’t need external bug-tracking or reporting software to manage the process. 5. Improve Since your whole team can see changes and updates, they can use this knowledge to make improvements as they go. Instead of making the same mistake throughout the project, you can run quality control in real time, as the project is being built. This will help you catch any issues early so you can make changes and modifications straight away (rather than dealing with lots at the end of the project). 6. Keep files together Keep all of your files together so your whole team can reuse them when needed. Most authoring tools will let you manage images and media files together in one place so you don’t waste time searching for or emailing around files that they need. Final Thoughts As we saw with The Marshmallow Challenge, team collaboration is much like a contact sport - you have to get your sleeves rolled up and get stuck in. Collaboration helps get everyone involved in the process right from the start so you can reach that ta-da! moment at the end of the challenge. We need to learn from our kindergarten colleagues. By getting started and focusing on iterating the process, we can implement what works and quickly throw out what doesn’t work. This approach ensures that when we reach the end of the project, the marshmallow is sitting firmly on top. The post The Marshmallow Challenge: What We Can Learn From Kindergarten Students About Team Collaboration appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Can too many cooks spoil the broth, or can they make the broth taste better? In this article I explore 7 tips you can enhance eLearning quality by involving more of your Learning and Development team. eLearning development is usually a team process. But with so many skills and personalities, how can you get utilize everyone in the most effective way? Let’s look at some practical tips to help you to get the best from your Learning and Development team. 1. Set up your team for success Make sure that responsibilities and expectations are communicated to all members of the team. Give your team the responsibility for quality control by providing standardized instructions, style guides, reference materials, and project files. 2. Create a culture that embraces agile methodologies The need to involve multiple team members with different talents can pose a number of challenges. Consider adopting an agile approach in which the team is one and everybody in the team is responsible for the result and quality. This is a big game changer. There will be no more "Sorry it’s late, the testing didn’t finish on time". The team is responsible for the tasks and project deadlines. In an ideal situation, all members have all the necessary skills. Unfortunately, this is never the case in the real world. But, it is surprising how much responsibility people can share if the expectation is set from the start. Encourage your team to look beyond their core skill sets. For example, ask your graphics person to quality check the overall design and layout. Ask your developer and testers to use correct language in your content. And ask your Instructional Designer to help with sourcing imagery. By involving more people on a project, you can speed up the time it takes to review and make changes. Further, if you use smaller review cycles, you can iterate faster which will help you improve overall quality. 3. Enable online collaboration Online collaboration makes it easier to involve all team members in discussion, which reduces the chance of miscommunications which can impact the quality and accuracy of the end product. Here are 3 ways you use online collaboration to foster a good team-working environment: Host team hangouts: Try hosting knowledge-sharing hangouts twice a month where your team comes together to present a project. Discuss the challenges you encounter and how you overcame them. This teaches your team new practices that can increase overall efficiency. Share lessons learned: Share expertise, tools and resources, solutions and techniques, and good practice. Embrace online collaboration tools: Some authoring tools -like Elucidat- have inbuilt online review/comment systems which makes collaboration fast and efficient. If your tool doesn’t have this feature, take a look at Trello. Related: Why Online Collaboration Is The Solution To Your Learning And Development Team’s Efficiency Problem 4. Use tools that encourage your team to work together, simultaneously Modern, cloud-based tools make it possible for all of your team to be work on one project simultaneously. This can significantly reduce the time and effort spent on packaging and moving files to-and-from team members. At Elucidat, we’ve added "roles" so you can quickly grant different rights to different people. For example, you can have assign team members to test and review chapter one, while you assign others to design and develop chapter two. By assigning roles you can eliminate the risk of the reviewer accidentally making changes or deleting anything in chapter two. You can also assign your Subject Matter Expert (SME) as a content editor. This role gives him or her the right to change and add text or images to pages, but not to create or delete pages. For Subject Matter Experts who have content knowledge, but no eLearning authoring skills, this can be very useful. 5. Use inbuilt online review The best way to improve team efficiency is to use a tool with inbuilt online review. Consider selecting an authoring tool -like Elucidat- that provides reviewing and commenting functionality right inside the project itself. This will save you the need to use additional software to track and manage your review process. 6. Empower Subject Matter Experts to design and develop If the project is small, simple, or highly technical, empowering your Subject Matter Experts create the course themselves can save time and money. You can complete a lot more projects this way, and reduce costs associated with hiring additional staff. Tools that let you easily create courses from a master theme (template) will help ensure your Subject Matter Experts produce eLearning that is consistent with your other courses and meets your instructional design standards. 7. Use freelancers to scale up (or down) production It’s expensive to keep staff around when you may not always have work for them. Instead, why not consider is taking on freelancers as extra-hands for your team when you need to increase production? You can test the waters by engaging new freelancers on straightforward, low-risk projects to see how you work together. When you feel comfortable with working relationship, you can integrate them into your Learning and Development team and involve them in more projects. Start Involving Your Entire Team New technology has now made it more important than ever to involve all of your Learning and Development team in the eLearning development process. Gone are the days of relying on specialists to create modules or design pages, tools like Elucidat remove the technical headaches so everyone on your team has the design and development skills to create best practice eLearning. The post 7 Tips To Involve Your Learning And Development Team And Enhance eLearning Quality appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Elearning Superstars is a curated list of inspiring elearning examples, published every Tuesday. Subscribe to get weekly updates via email. This week we have some great elearning by The Guardian, Drug Treatment, and Training Bricks. Showcase your elearning: Have you created a great piece of elearning that you’re really proud of? Showcase your elearning here to win awards and get published on Elearning Superstars. 1. The Guardian: The anatomy of a wind turbine 2. DrugTreatment.com: Essential information about drug rehabilitation 3. Training Bricks: On the farm The post Elearning inspiration: The Guardian, Drug Treatment, On The Farm appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Do you have an strategy for compliance training? We’ve curated six of the best articles on compliance training to help you create more effective elearning. Christopher Pappas: 7 tips for effective online compliance training Successful online compliance training programs are rare and few between. An effective program must make sure employees understand the rules, no matter how complex they are, and protect your company’s most valuable asset: its reputation. In this article, Christopher shares seven tips to create the most effective online compliance training courses. Here are Christopher’s seven tips for compliance training courses David Becker: What’s your elearning strategy for compliance training? Compliance not only helps to manage risks and control costs, it also contributes to brand value and revenue. In this article, David shares how designing a compliance training strategy based on a risk assessment model and treatment hierarchy can drive a more rational, measurable and aligned approach to compliance training. Read David’s approach to compliance training Asha Pandey: How to create a sticky learning experience in compliance training In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, he says a message is "sticky" when it makes an impact, sticks with you beyond the learning experience, and when it influences your behavior. In this article, Asha elaborates further on this sticky concept, explaining how innovative approaches must be adopted when creating online compliance courses. Read Asha’s approaches to creating a "sticky" compliance training experience Heather Pope: Using storytelling for compliance: Why Storytelling is at the heart of great compliance training Storytelling is useful when you need to make data and complex information meaningful and relevant to your audience. In this article, Heather Pope explains how using storytelling helps compliance learners not only absorb information, but also change behavior. Learn Heather’s four tips on how best to use storytelling John J. Park: How mobile learning tackles compliance training   Find out how the Qualcomm’s Mobile Learning team created a solution that sets a model for mobile compliance apps. Read John’s article on mobile compliance training Melissa Dougherty: 2 Top tips to make compliance training fun through gamification Do your employees find compliance training boring? Have you tried gamifying your online compliance training courses? This is a must read for any business as Melissa shares her two key tips to making compliance training fun! Discover how to make compliance training more enjoyable The post Compliance training ideas from six elearning experts appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Four elearning experts share their predictions and ideas on elearning design in 2015. Try implementing some of these ideas in your own elearning courses. Connie Malamed: 8 learning design trends to watch in 2015 Global internet access, shifts in workplace power structures and wider dissemination of cognitive research are some factors contributing to new design trends this year. In this article, Connie shares her eight design trends to look out for in 2015. Learn about Connie’s eight design trends Shawn Scivally: 6 hot graphic design trends for elearning gurus in 2015 The visual aspect is a huge part of the elearning experience. Research tells us that 65 percent of the population are visual learners, so keeping up with the latest graphic design trends may be the difference between capturing your users attention or not. Read Shawn’s hot graphic design trends Tim Buff: Top 5 Design Considerations for Creating Mobile Learning Have you ever used a mobile device to take an eLearning course that was originally designed for computer-based training? If so, how did you feel about the overall learning and user experience? Read Tim’s ideas of mobile learning design Steve Lee: 3 Design Guidelines to Consider for Mobile Learning Have you ever used a mobile device to take an eLearning course that was originally designed for computer-based training? If so, how did you feel about the overall learning and user experience? Read Steve’s design guidelines for mobile learning The post Connie Malamed, Shawn Scivally, Tim Buff and Steve Lee share their elearning design predictions and ideas appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Elearning Superstars is a curated list of inspiring elearning examples, published every Tuesday. Subscribe to get weekly updates via email. This week we have some great elearning by HP, St Mungo’s, and Heineken. We’ve also curated a list of the 10 most popular elearning examples. Showcase your elearning: Have you created a great piece of elearning that you’re really proud of? Showcase your elearning here to win awards and get published on Elearning Superstars. HP LIFE: Online courses to help you gain real-life business and technology skills to start or grow your business St Mungo’s: Elearning induction program Heineken: Game-based elearning Top 10: This is a collection of the most popular elearning examples on ElearningSuperstars.com The post Elearning inspiration: HP, St Mungo’s, Heineken appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Elearning Superstars is a curated list of inspiring elearning examples, published every Tuesday. Subscribe to get weekly updates via email. Here’s a list of the 10 most inspiring examples on Elearning Superstars. 1. PETSYNC: LIVING WITH A DOG IN A SHARED COMMUNITY 2. CHANNEL 4: LEARNING TO TAKE RISKS 3. DRUG TREATMENT: ESSENTIAL INFORMATION ABOUT REHABILITATION 4. THE DANGERS OF FRACKING 5. US ARMY: CONNECT WITH HAJI KAMAL 6. MEDIEVAL SWANSEA: CITY WITNESS USE ELUCIDAT TO DEVELOP AN INTERACTIVE ELEARNING GAME 7. HEINEKEN CAPABILITY ACADEMY 8. MCDONALD’S: TILL TRAINING GAME 9. LIFESAVER "CRISIS SIMULATOR" 10. TRAIN4TRADESKILLS: VIRTUAL REALITY HOUSE   The post Top 10 most inspiring elearning examples (Elearning Superstars) appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

If you’re a training manager in a global organization looking to make sure your educational materials reach all your employees, eLearning translation and localization may just be the answer. In this article, I’ll show you how to save time and money in your eLearning translation projects. Although eLearning is highly extensible because it can be localized into your target audiences’ own languages, it can also be tricky. In this article, we’ll consider a few key points and simple guidelines you can follow to save time and money on even the most complex eLearning translation projects. 1. Planning Phase Plan ahead. Before you create your course, factor in all the languages that the course will be needed in. This will help you schedule the project and allow time for the course to be translated. Inform your team. Inform your team so they can design course materials that make it easy to translate. For example, use images that appeal to a range of cultures and audiences, not just a single group of learners. Involve stakeholders. Get input from all the stakeholders, including colleagues from the target countries. They can alert you to specific regional requirements that you can factor in from the start. They may have additional resources such as local office or site imagery that you can use. Create a Master course. Tools like Elucidat let you create multiple courses from one template. This saves you heaps of time. All you do is create the course one time as a Master, then for each language that the course is required in, you create projects from the Master course. This ensures all the content is included in each, ready to be sent for translation. No need to start from scratch when you create the course for each new language. [Related: How to use Master Courses (templates)] 2. Development Phase Once you are into the development, there are few basic points to keep in mind. Take care with your fonts. When you create your Master course (from which all your translations will be built), make sure you select a universal font that can be converted easily to other languages. Unicode fonts like Arial will retain integrity when translated to languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet, such as Chinese or Russian. Use a universal theme. When you create your Master course, design the interface so that it can be usable by anyone regardless of their native language. For example, use icons or symbols on buttons rather than text to explain its function. Designing buttons that can be understood by all cultures and languages will save time versus having new buttons created for each of your required languages. Imagery. Steer clear of using or producing imagery that has text in it. Why? Because it will need to be reworked for each language the course is required in. Instead, use images that convey meaning without words. Media. For rich eLearning experiences, video, animation and voice over can be really effective media. You’ll need to consider the best way to handle these in translated courses if you don’t have the budget to have these re-recorded in local languages. Subtitles are one option, but costs will vary depending on the length and style of the video. The most cost-effective option is to provide a transcript in the target language to accompany audio or video content. Some eLearning tools, such as Elucidat, make it possible for you to integrate a transcript as an STR file so it behaves like closed captions with video content. This is really very user friendly, as learners are familiar with using closed captions for web-based applications. Room for expansion. Be aware that when you translate courses, the amount of text on the screen can increase. Screen real estate needs to be taken into consideration. For example, when you translate an English text to a language such as German, the character count can be as much as 30% higher. This could cause issues of overrun and make formatting a nightmare. eLearning tools that are responsive or let you easily adjust the point size of text at a global level can be real time savers. This will allow the text to automatically realign on the screen to accommodate the extra character or allow you to reduce the text size once, rather than have to format each screen manually. 3. Post Development Phase Unless you have people in your organisation who can translate professionally from the source to the target language, you may need to employ an agency. The benefit of using an agency is that they will be experienced and have a pool of talent that will be able to cover all the languages you require. They’ll manage the process through for you, which will save you lots of time, but there are still a few ways you can help streamline the process. Translation tools. Some eLearning tools make localization very easy. Translation features in Elucidat allow you to create a project for each of your target languages and export a file that can be sent to translation agencies. This file has all the content that is needed by the agency to translate into target languages. Once your agency is done, they just send back the file and you can import the correct one to your courses. The course is automatically populated with all the content in the target language. Some tools also allow you to automatically translate any text directly inside the user interface (anything on the screen that isn’t content, e.g., ‘Menu’). Stakeholder and Subject Matter Experts (SME). Prime your stakeholders and Subject Matter Experts to be your proofreaders and quality controllers for the courses developed in their languages. All they need to do is go through the course and sense check the text for accuracy and meaning. Tools like Elucidat enable you to share your projects with stakeholders while assigning roles, which restrict their access. This stops them from deleting courses! Furthermore, tools with inbuilt commenting make it easy for your colleagues to quickly and easily point out any issues of concern. Final Thoughts As the global economy expands, more organizations will find themselves grappling with the logistics of delivering online training to staff around the world. By taking into account these guidelines, you can help to ensure you can deliver on your eLearning translation requirements. If you’d like to read more on the topic, head over to our article that explores more eLearning translation tips. The post Elearning translation projects: Save time and money with these ideas appeared first on Elucidat Blog.